What YOUR army needs to win games: Core elements of a competitive list

 

One of the most well-rounded armies of the competitive scene

With no less than 106  army lists released in the last year, it’s the perfect time to be thinking about exactly what makes a list competitive. After all, it’s useless to assess the power of army rules unless you know what they’re making up for, and this is primarily a product of what they’re ‘missing’.

As it turns out, there are about 7 core capabilities that an army wants to have access to, and every one that they can’t access makes the list fundamentally weaker. Some of these are more important than others, and none of them are truly essential, but every one that a list can’t access reduces its capacity to reliably win games. As such, this kind of thinking makes for a great way to assess all the new armies to see how competitively viable they are. And once you’ve picked an army, it’s always smart to try to fit in as many of these elements as you can.

Without further ado, let’s dive straight into perhaps the most fundamental element…

Efficient battleline

Not an army that struggles to field an efficient battleline

Almost every competitive list is based off a solid line of warriors. They tend to provide most of a list’s damage output, secure most of the objectives, and above all keep the rest of the list safe. If you don’t have a line of warriors to throw in front of your opponent’s tricks, then they will ultimately have a huge amount of control over the pacing of the game. Their heroes will fight yours on their terms and not on yours, and you will be unable to reliably stop them from getting their models where they want to go. Basic lines of warriors are truly so valuable, and almost every list will want to field 30-40 of them.

Given this, you really do want to have access to efficient troops. If you’re overpaying by even 1 point per model on these guys, then your opponent will effectively get 4-5 extra models over you for free. And conversely, being even half a point undercosted on something like your Depths Goblins can equate to being 4 models up on where you ‘should’ be. That’s really powerful, and gives your list a heap of extra capability.

Relevantly, your battleline need not be elite, or durable, or heavy-hitting, or even necessarily numerous, just efficient. 15 Beornings is an efficient battleline, as is a swarm of Moria Goblins, a well-buffed Shire horde, an Easterling phalanx or even an Éored of Sons of Éorl. Sometimes a more elite or hard-hitting battleline will be better, sometimes a cheaper horde. The key aspect that you should look for here is something that you’re happy to have taking up space on the frontline that isn’t overcosted.

Mobility

Mobility means a lot of things, but Ugluk's Scouts are good at all of them

Mobility is honestly a huge topic that deserves its own article, because there are lots of kinds of mobility that serve different purposes. Easy access to Heroic March (including via a Drum) is one kind, letting your whole army cross the board at a decent speed. Having enough models (that aren’t too reliant on auric buffs for efficiency) that can spread out and be in multiple parts of the board is another. Having individual fast models that can sneak off a board edge or jump on an Heirloom are another, with speed (and, sometimes, not having the Beast keyword) being more important than durability or hitting power for these roles.

Certain scenarios will incentivise some of these kinds of mobility over the others, but the more you can access the more easily your list will compete in a variety of missions.

Focussed damage output

Sometimes, you need a better plan to kill things than 'drown it in efficient bodies'

Killing stuff is important, because dead enemies can neither kill you nor score VPs. An efficient battleline can absolutely kill enemies, and I think people often underestimate how big a percentage of their kills come from their warriors. But it generally does so in a fairly random manner across the battleline and over time, rather than in any specific position.

Put another way, 40 Orcs may well kill 4-5 Gondorians in a given turn. But in any given fight, it’s hard to rely on your Orcs killing a Gondorian. The enemy might just roll a six, or you might whiff on your duel or wound rolls. And similarly, basic Orcs will eventually drag down most enemy heroes. But on any given turn, that hero can very plausibly roll a six and push everyone back.

As such, it’s valuable to have sources of focussed damage output that you can apply in a specific spot and reliably kill a specific model. This can let you clear an objective at speed, assassinate an enemy hero or banner, or smash a path through a battleline or a chokepoint.

For a lot of armies, this focussed damage will come from either heroes or monsters, because they bring a lot more damage output in a smaller space than most warriors. But it could also come from elite infantry like Berserkers, pikes to put extra dice into key fights, or magic/auric buffs that make one area of the board really swing your way like Wrath of Bruinen or Thranduil’s bubbles. They key is just having a way to apply damage output precisely, rather than just slowly grinding the enemy down across the board.

Anti-hero options

Jamming the Golden King into heroes is definitely a good way to tie them up!

Unfortunately, dastardly opponents have also thought about the above issue, and so they’ve probably brought some heroes or monsters along to provide their own focussed damage output. As such, you want to have a way to deal with them yourself.

Exactly how much you care about this will vary, depending on where your heroes sit in the combat spectrum. If they’re super killy themselves, then great, that will often solve your problem; send your Elessar into their hero and they probably won’t have a hero anymore. And on the other end of the spectrum, if your heroes are really weak themselves, then it’s also less of an issue because you don’t need those heroes on the frontline. Ugluk doesn’t really need to be anywhere near the enemy’s focussed damage output, so you can hide him and your random Captains behind waves of warriors and not regret their absence too much. You can still run into problems with enemies hiding their warriors behind scary heroes or monsters you can’t fight, but at least those heroes or monsters are just killing your efficient battleline and not your heroes.

Where things get tricky is with middling sort of heroes (or monsters, or expensive warriors), who are too weak to take on your opponent’s heroes but too expensive to justify leaving out of the fight. As I discussed in my first ever article on this blog, the worst thing for a combat hero to be is just a little bit weaker than your opponent’s combat heroes. In lists reliant on these middling heroes you will particularly want to bring along other tools that can shut down enemy heroes, like magic, heroes with Heroic Defence, or the ability to shoot/Hurl into the hero’s combat.

Incidentally, this sort of thinking is a perfect example of why Cave Trolls aren’t great in Depths of Moria. Enemy heroes don’t want to fight the Balrog, they can’t fight the Watcher, and they’ll never kill enough Goblins to matter. But a Cave Troll is both weak enough to be killed easily, and expensive enough to matter when it happens. Models like this dramatically increase how vulnerable your list is to heroes, and thus how much you need to invest in anti-hero tech.

Banner VPs

The posterboys of 'I don't need a banner'

Banner VPs objectively are not essential. About half of the Top 5 armies in the game don’t have access to banner VPs and are clearly not suffering too much for it. Moreover, my personal experience (based on the 120-something games I’ve recorded in TTA this edition) is that I’ve only had a single game come down to a margin of less than the banner VPs on offer. That is, in every other game the eventual score was sufficiently clear that you could have removed banner VPs and not had any impact on the result.

In fact, the army that started down on banner VPs actually won more often than the army that started with them in my data set, which seems to imply that banner VPs are a disadvantage (although I would caution against reading into this too much, because there are surely skewing factors and the small sample size at play here). But it’s certainly clear from this little sample that banners aren’t being the difference maker in many of my games this edition. Put another way, banner VPs don’t seem to actually swing many games one way or the other, for all that they feel unfair at times.

In saying all of that, it’s obviously better to have VPs than not to have them, and armies that can’t access banner VPs need to have a bit of extra oomph somewhere or other. So if a list can’t bring along a banner or some other equivalent (Rosie Cotton, apparently), you should be looking for some extra power somewhere in their toolkit.

Archery (or ways to mitigate it)

Sometimes you just walk into a wall of crossbows and need to have a plan for that

Shooting may be becoming less important than it was in the first half of the edition, but it’s still powerful in quite a lot of scenarios and matchups. As such, having access to efficient shooting is a real benefit to a list.

Of course, lots of army lists just don’t have any good options here, and that’s not the end of the world. Instead, they may be best off leaning on tools to either mitigate enemy shooting (via things like Blinding Light, or just having durable or numerous troops that can cop a few volleys), or to cross the board quickly (such as with Heroic March or a Drum, or just higher movement speed).

Again, it isn’t a total loss if you can’t access these tools; Depths has done well all edition without any great shooting or anti-shooting-tricks, because you can overcome many problems with sufficiently-efficient Goblins. But if you don’t have some way to deal with enemy shooting, you’re occasionally going to have a bad day in To the Death against a gunline. That’s especially true if you don’t have a good source of focussed damage output, so make sure you fit in at least one or the other in most armies.

Tricks

Both the Watcher and Saruman are experts at reaching behind the enemy lines

Our final element is one that can go under the radar a little, because it’s a fairly amorphous concept. What I’m trying to capture with ‘tricks’ is some way of interfering with your opponents plans, ideally by reaching behind their lines somehow. In short, you want some way to mess with enemy models that aren’t on the frontline or immediately behind it. Lists that don’t have tricks can find themselves frustrated by an opponent who keeps their banner/leader/warrior-holding-a-relic just behind their lines in total safety. In short, you want some way to counter the opponent’s efficient battleline by reaching beyond it: you want to be able to exert your damage output onto the models that you choose, rather than just the basic warriors that your opponent wants you to be killing.

The archetypal form of these tricks is magic, with Compel being particularly devastating as a way to reach behind the enemy lines and move enemy models into vulnerable positions. Things like Spectres and Sentinels are similarly useful, but powerful shooting like Legolas or a Dragon can fulfill similar roles. Mobility (particularly from flyers) can also do the job of reaching behind the enemy lines, and even scary heroes or monsters that can easily Combat/Barge/Hurl through the enemy can threaten their backfield in a pinch. It’s a broad category that can capture lots of things, but ultimately it’s an important one if you don’t want your opponent to be able to set the pace of the game.

Worked examples

Putting this all together, we can start to see why some lists have proven capable of great things, while others have struggled to break out.

Army of the White Hand showing why it's one of the top armies in the game (u/OllieoftheVale)

Looking at Army of the White Hand first, they have a fairly efficient battleline, excellent mobility in every sense, some of the best anti-hero tech in the game, solid archery, banners, and a comical pile of tricks. They historically lacked focussed damage output (not having any heroes scarier than a Scout Captain will do that to a list), but even that is mitigated by being able to drop in Gorulf. Overall, it’s clear that it’s a list that can do just about everything you would want an army to do, so it’s no surprise that it’s been winning plenty of events.

A very cool army, but one that's missing a lot of key capabilities

On the flipside, poor Army of Thror is missing all sorts of things. Their battleline is moderately efficient still, but they have trouble with every kind of mobility. They have solid focussed damage output from all their heroes, and they have enough durable heroes that they’re okay on the anti-hero front. D7 across the board helps a lot against shooting, but they have neither banner VPs nor the tricks to impact the opponent’s banner. With so many missing elements of a competitive list, you’re looking for some real power in their profiles and army rules, and it’s just not there anymore.

Not a versatile list, but one that's extremely good at what it's aiming to do

A third example, to act as something of a caveat: Beornings remain genuinely strong this edition, but are missing quite a few tools. They have an efficient battleline, but quite poor mobility. They have an absolute pile of focussed damage output (does it even count as focussed when you’re likely to kill everything you touch?), and the Bears themselves are obviously great anti-hero options. But they have no banner VPs, generally limited archery with no way to mitigate it, and almost no tricks as I’m defining them here. For all this though, they are just so good at the things they do well that they will probably be able to do well regardless, even if their lack of tools will probably keep them out of the very top tier.

Conclusion: bringing it all together

Two lists that can bring many of these elements, but neither of which can access them all

As that last example hopefully showed, you don’t need all of these tools in order to win games. In fact, there are only a handful of armies in the whole game that can truly tick every box, and I don’t think any of them will actually be as strong as some of the less-flexible-but-more-powerful builds out there.

Nonetheless, these elements are a great way of assessing army lists, both to see whether a particular way of building them is solid (‘I don’t have much mobility or ways to deal with archery, maybe I should fit in a model with March’) and to determine whether the base army is any good (‘Battle of the Greenfields looks really scary, but it doesn’t have mobility, banner VPs, anti-hero tech, tricks, or even much focussed damage output. Maybe it’s a little overhyped’).

I hope you enjoyed this more analytical article, and you find it helpful when choosing and building armies in the future. I’ve got all sorts of exciting content coming out soon, ranging from several much-delayed tournament reports, to how to win your hard matchups and smash your easy ones, tips  for warband construction, and much more. So keep your eyes out for exciting things to come!

Until next come, may your list always have enough of these elements to compete!